There is a long tradition of work in syntax (and to a certain degree
in phonology) that makes use of computationally restricted formal
systems (such as a class of grammars) to simplify analyses of
specific phenomena and provide explanations of general properties of
human language. When such work is successful, it lends support to the
hypothesis that computational restrictiveness plays an important role
in determining the nature of grammar. As far as I am aware, there have
not been corresponding efforts in the domain of the syntax-semantics
interface, aiming to simplify and explain through computational
restrictions. In this talk, I will review a line of research,
underway for some time but not well-known in the linguistics
community, that attempts to do this. This work makes use of a
"synchronous" extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), a
computationally restrictive grammar formalism whose ability to account
for and explain facts of syntactic distribution has been the object of
previous study. Building on case studies involving reflexive
interpretation, scope, and donkey anaphora, I will show that the
synchronous TAG formalism allows for the simplification of previous
analyses, and I will suggest that this approach holds out the
potential for a restrictive theory of mismatches between surface
syntax and logical form.

Friday, December 4, 2009How is a raven like a writing desk? Parallels and divergences between numerical and scalar quantifiers

On many theories, numerical quantifiers and scalar quantifiers are
interpreted in a similar fashion. First there is an initial semantic
analysis which is lower bounded ("some" is interpreted as some and
possibly all, "two" as two and possibly more). Second, in some
contexts, a scalar implicature is calculated which provides an upper
bound for the expression ("some" is interpreted as some but not all,
"two" as two and no more). We have explored this hypothesis by
examining the interpretation of scalar and numerical quantifiers in
young children and the moment-to-moment processing of these
terms in both children and adults. The findings strongly support the
conventional analysis of scalar quantifiers. Adults rapidly access the
lower-bounded interpretation of "some" but are slow to calculate the
scalar implicature. Children typically fail to do so. However, these
findings suggest that the interpretation of numerical quantifiers
involves a very different process: adults immediately access the
upper bound of a number and children reliably infer that
numerically-quantified phrases are exact by three years of age.
We suggest that the previously-observed parallels between
numerical and scalar quantifiers reflect their common logical
properties rather than a common mechanism.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009Word order development in English and Norwegian: Micro-cues, information structure and economy

Sometimes it is the oddest facts that provide the best clues to
significant properties of language, because their very oddity limits the
space in which we are likely to search for possible explanations. In
this talk, I argue that the strange behavior of Russian nominal phrases
with paucal numerals ('two', 'three' and 'four') provide clues of just
this type concerning the syntactic side of morphological case.
When a nominal phrase like the Russian counterpart of 'these last two
beautiful tables' occupies a nominative environment, the pre-numeral
demonstrative and adjective ('these last') bear nominative plural
morphology, and the numeral itself is nominative. The post-numeral
adjective ('beautfiul'), however, is often genitive plural; and the noun
('table') is genitive singular -- a situation that the illustrious
Russian grammarian Peshkovsky (1956) characterized as "a typical example
of the degree to which grammatical and logical thinking may diverge".
I suggest that the behavior of these phrases is actually entirely
logical -- once one adopts a particular structural analysis of the
Russian DP. and a particular view of the nature of case morphology.
Developing ideas by Richards (2007), I propose that Russian is a covert
case-stacking language in which the realization of out case morphemes
suppresses the pronunciation of inner morphemes -- with this process
restricted, however, by the phonological freezing effect of phase
spell-out (Chomsky 1995; 2001). The case affixes themselves —
traditionally classified using case-specific sui generis terminology
(nominative, genitive, etc.) — are actually instantiations of the
various syntactic categories: N, P and V. The interaction of this
proposal with the theory of phases and spellout raises at least the
possibility that there is no special theory of morphological case.

Friday, October 9, 2009Production Experiments and Morphosyntactic Representations in Slovenian

In this talk, I will discuss work with Lanko Marusic and Bill Badecker
that looks at verbal agreement with conjoined noun phrase subjects, such
as /erasers-fem.pl and pens-neuter.pl were sold/, in Slovenian, a
language with three genders and three numbers. The research consists of
four parts:
Experiment 1: Effects of Mixing Genders
Experiment 2: Effects of Directionality
Experiment 3: Effects of Mixing Numbers
Experiment 4: The Curious Case of 5&Ups
I demonstrate that the grammatical option of agreeing with only a single
conjunct -- even in preverbal position -- is robustly attested, and
propose that it arises (ontogenetically and phylogentically, so to
speak) due to the ambiguity in the paradigm created by syncretisms. This
single-conjunct agreement is usually optional, but is (a) impossible
when inconsistent with the number of the conjunction as a whole, and (b)
forced when the conjunction as a whole has no number, due to the
presence of numerically quantified noun phrases, such as "5 cars".

The lecture involves extensive research and data on V2 and wh- in a number of Germanic
languages and dialects, as well as original fieldwork, related to theoretical
questions about the left-periphery and Phase theory.

Phonological variation is conditioned by both grammatical and
non-grammatical factors. Nearly all models of variation in
phonological theory are exclusively grammatical, and do not account
for the influence of non-grammatical factors. In this talk, I argue
that an adequate theory of phonological variation should account for
both grammatical and non-grammatical influences on variation, and I
develop a noisy Harmonic Grammar model of variation that can do this.
I focus on t/d-deletion in English as an example of a variable
phenomenon influenced by both grammatical and non-grammatical factors,
and use the influence of usage frequency on this process as an example
of a non-grammatical factor impacting variation. The proposal
developed in this talk is compared to existing models of phonological
variation both form the theoretical phonology tradition, and from
variationist sociolinguistics.

Friday, September 18, 2009Distributed Agreement in Archi and Other Languages

b. The Case-Dependency of Agreement Parameter
F agrees with DP/NP only if F values the case feature of DP/NP or vice versa.
(Baker 2008: 15)

According to Baker, in languages with a positive setting for Parameter 1, if a certain Thead
agrees with some NP X, it must necessarily assign a (nominative) case to it.
Therefore, agreement on both auxiliary and main verb with the same NP X is impossible,
since that would result in multiple case assignment to the same NP, which is impossible.
If, however, agreement does not depend on case, distributed agreement (agreement of a
single type, such as subject-verb agreement, found on two or more words within a clause)
is possible, as it does not require assignment of multiple case values to the same NP.
Thus, these parameters make the strong prediction that distributed agreement is found
only in languages that do not value the case feature of DP/NP, as in some Bantu
languages. For example, in Kinande, a Bantu language, agreement is not with the
nominative nominal, but with the sentence-initial nominal, as in (2).

On the basis of recent fieldwork on Archi, a language of the Nakh-Daghestanian
(Northwest Caucasian) language family, we show that this prediction is not borne out.
We show first that in Archi verbs agree in gender (class) and number with the absolutive
nominal (subject of an intransitive or direct object of a transitive), regardless of word
order. Thus, Archi has a negative setting for parameter 1a and a positive setting for
parameter 1b, similar in these respects to Indo-European languages. This means that
Baker’s theory predicts that Archi could not have distributed agreement.

The fact that agreement shows up in both the lexical verb, ‘praise’, and the
auxiliary indicates that Archi has distributed agreement.

We show that Archi also
demonstrates distributed agreement with modal auxiliaries, with agreeing adverbs, with
‘seem’, and with emphatic pronouns. We show that similar facts are found in Chechen,
another language of the Nakh-Daghestanian family; in Daga, an Austronesian language
of Papua New Guinea; and in a number of other languages on which we have only
secondary data.

We suggest that within Baker’s hypothesis agreement such as that in (3) can be
treated as concord, which lies outside the paramters stated in (1). On the other hand, if
this approach is taken, it raises the issue of whether (1) really makes testable predictions.

References

Baker, Mark. 2008. The Syntax of Agreement and Concord. Cambridge University Press